


I wanna hurry home to you

by nearperfectthing



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: a future-ish fic, warning: sappiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:43:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22163584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nearperfectthing/pseuds/nearperfectthing
Summary: When Ronan proposed, he was thinking, a promise.
Relationships: Ronan Farrow/Jon Lovett
Comments: 9
Kudos: 82





	I wanna hurry home to you

**Author's Note:**

> I’m still extremely soft about the engagement. Someone on tumblr mentioned a while ago that “Slow Show” by the National was a Jon and Ronan song, and I have thought about it every day since, so that’s where the title is from. As always, I appreciate all of your respect for the fourth wall, and I hope you enjoy.

Bless Jonathan, who had not broken up with him. There were times Ronan really believed he would. Fights they had had, when Ronan was overtired and not eating but more importantly, breaking every promise he had ever made to Jon, interrupting dinner time with phone calls or not making it home for dinner at all. There were times when Ronan went to bed (alone, on his side of the country) and woke up (alone, on his side of the country) and thought it might be like that forever. They made it through. 

It wasn’t exactly an accident, that they weren’t married. The first of the three couples to meet, the last to get married. It wasn’t a lack of commitment. The Lovetts had lived a happy enough life, based around a happy enough marriage, but Jon had known from an early age that he didn't want his parents' life. The suburbs, the rote, 9 to 5 jobs that kept your kids in the best neighborhood schools, the family dinners where you argued about movies because arguing about politics was too strained. Jon was never going to settle for that.

And Ronan, well, sometimes Ronan thought he didn’t even know what a happy marriage looked like. It wasn’t an accident, that they weren’t married. 

Ronan was a lawyer, which meant that he understood marriage to be a legal contract. Ronan was spiritual, which meant that he understood marriage to be a promise made before God. And Ronan was practical, which meant that he understood marriage to be a disrupter to the resilient bond he and Jon had managed to build. What they had was a system of agreements, many unspoken, that together balanced precariously into a relationship, into happiness. Marriage introduced new rules, rules that sometimes, sleep deprived and stressed, Ronan worried they wouldn’t be able to handle. 

When Ronan proposed, he was thinking,  _ A promise _ . He was thinking,  _ A legal document,  _ he was thinking,  _ Commitment _ ,  _ no backing out now _ , he was thinking of a ring on his finger, of one on Jon’s too, he was thinking,  _ Forever _ . He was not thinking about the actual wedding. 

Which, okay, it took them a while to plan. Or rather, to finally decide to hand off the planning to anyone and everyone in the family who wanted it. Jon could do the flowers. Ronan could absolutely not do the food, literally no one wants to eat your weird food, Ronan. Gross. 

Very little about the wedding followed a traditional service except this: Jon breaking the glass under the heel of one brand new dress shoe. In the first row of white folding chairs, his mother cried.

Actually, Jon cried too. Ronan smiled at him, a subtle, laughing smile that said,  _ So much for all that big talk about not getting emotional in front of everyone _ and Jon scowled back at him, a scowl that said,  _ Who are you to talk, you haven’t stopped crying in three days.  _

They had talked about a honeymoon, gone as far as to look up plane tickets, but it never could have happened, that summer. They never went. Instead, they called every trip they ever went on a honeymoon. It worked to their advantage sometimes,  _ You can’t possibly ask me to finish up the Crooked taxes this weekend, Ronan and I are going on our honeymoon. Three days in Detroit, with Lovett or Leave it right in the middle.  _

They had too many friends. No, seriously, they had too many friends. Two sides of the country. A half-dozen higher education degrees and careers between them to populate their social circles. Ronan’s family, the whole staff at Crooked. A lot of people who used to have really, really high security clearance. All of whom wanted to come to the first one-year-old’s birthday party Jon and Ronan ever threw. Did one-year-olds even need birthday parties? So there were too many friends, and there was chocolate cake (and carrot cake and red velvet cake, because why not), and Pundit was bumping into everyone’s legs and by the end Jon was lying on the couch and Ronan was lying on top of him with the baby on top of them both and then Pundit tried to climb up to join in, and the baby started shrieking delightly, like almost falling off a couch from the destabilizing force of a goldendoodle was the most fun roller-coaster in the world. There was something kind of wonderful, Ronan thought, about how babies took so much joy from yelling. It reminded him of Jon. 

The baby talk thing had never made sense to Jon. He talked to the kids like he would talk to any adult.  _ If I hand you the spoon, are you going to throw cheerios at me again?  _ He asked them, as toddlers.  _ While your instinct for estimating angles is impressive, I’m not sold on being the target of your catapult practice.  _ Like he really expected an answer. When they didn’t know a word, they could ask, and as a result, their vocabularies became insufferably advanced.  _ Who needs genetic material _ , Favs laughed,  _ no one would mistake these kids as belonging to anyone but you and Ronan.  _

Like any good kids, they weren’t particularly impressed with their fathers, or interested in what Jon and Ronan did during the day. They would learn eventually, pointing pudgy fingers at copies of  _ The New Yorker _ and saying  _ Da!  _ Sometimes, they pointed at  _ The Atlantic _ or  _ Time _ instead, and Jon just laughed, filed it away to make fun of Ronan later. 

No phones at the table. Some nights had to be taken off. Two parents available for every birthday. One parent available for every parent-teacher conference, but who it was had to alternate. Family dinner at least four times a week. Alternate who got up when a baby cried at night. Some exemptions after a long stretch of Pod Tours America, right before the deadline for a story, not to be over-used. This time, the rules were stated outright. Many of them were straight-forward, practical rules. Some of them were hard to abide by anyway. They did their best. Jon and Ronan, both ambitious overachievers. 

Here was a joke that was too easy to make: Ronan loved it, he didn’t leave it. And here was something true: Ronan loved. 


End file.
